Field
Embodiments of the present disclosure generally relate to electrical interconnections internal to an electronic assembly, and, in particular, to an apparatus and method to reduce an internal volume and quantity of electrical interconnections.
Description of Related Art
Electronic equipment or assemblies such as computer servers, routers, bridges, switches, gateways, specialized instrumentation (e.g., signal generators and signal monitors), etc., are often mounted in a standard-dimension rack within an equipment room or laboratory. Width of a standard rack is ordinarily 19″, with 23″ wide racks sometimes used for legacy equipment. Height of a full-size rack is about 6 feet. Each rack is divided into a plurality of shelf locations of uniform vertical separation from an adjacent shelf location, the separation being 1.75″ and referred to as one rack unit or “1 U”. A full-size rack is 42 U, i.e., forty-two possible shelf locations. An article of equipment may occupy an integer number of contiguous shelf locations, e.g., 1 U, 2 U, 3 U, etc. The article of equipment may be installed horizontally to occupy the entire width of the rack for the shelf location(s) it occupies, but half-width configurations are also available. Alternatively, smaller articles of equipment may be installed as vertically-mounted cards in a sub-shelf, the sub-shelf itself taking up an integer number of rack units.
Common or high-volume production electronic assemblies may be highly integrated within a shelf unit, e.g., by use of a single main circuit board (e.g., a motherboard) that compactly integrates most components onto the single main circuit board, including interconnection wiring.
However, some electronic assemblies (e.g., those for low-volume or specialized purposes) may include a relatively large number of discrete subsystems (i.e., components too large to be integrated onto a single main circuit board). Examples of assemblies may include disk drives, high-capacitance capacitor arrays, internal peripherals such as fans, and so forth. In some designs it may also be desirable to make the number of discrete subsystems be field-expandable, e.g., expandable by an end-user after manufacture. Designs may entail a large number of discrete interconnection wiring, e.g., discrete wiring cables, bundles or ribbons for data signals, clock signals, control signals, feedback signals, various direct current (DC) voltage levels of various amperage requirements, and electrical ground. The interconnection wiring is discrete in the sense that the wiring is not incorporated into a circuit board as traces.
A drawback of the known art is that a large number of discrete interconnection wiring may take up a significant portion of the internal volume of the electronic equipment, thus causing secondary problems such as blocking airflow and causing increased service times when adding, removing, or reconfiguring the discrete interconnection wiring. There also may be increased risk of dislodging or damaging a cable during servicing. Furthermore, there is always a desire to make electronic equipment smaller or to include additional functionality, which may further exasperate problems caused by stuffing a large (or larger) number of discrete interconnection wiring into a small (or smaller) physical volume. As the electronic equipment includes more subsystems generating more heat, airflow may be further blocked by discrete wiring dedicated to the more heat-generating subsystems.
Therefore, a more space-efficient discrete interconnection wiring is needed, while maintaining the advantages of electronic assemblies with discrete subsystems.